Description

This brief illustrates an application of production strategy analysis in the SANREM CRSP Ecuadorian site. Production strategy analysis is an interdisciplinary research approach that elucidates how different household livelihood portfolios draw from specific patterns of resources mobilization and social organization. The resulting typology maps the relation of household economics to natural resource management and community power dynamics. Within households, the approach recognizes there are significant behavioral and perceptual differences between how women and men view and use the environment. Yet, it refutes the eco-feminist postulation of women’s innate privileged link to nature (Shiva 1989), by explaining such differences in terms of the tasks women and men perform, the resources they access and control, and the decisions they are able to make.

This brief draws from articles by Cornelia Butler Flora, Fernando Larrea, Martha Ordonez,Sandra Chancay, Sara Baez, and Fernando Guerrero in Bridging Human and Ecological Landscapes: Participatory Research and Sustainable Development in an Andean Hillside Frontier. Edited by Robert Rhoades, Kendall/Hunt, Dubuque,Iowa, 2001.